Research trip to Australia

‘SPEECHES PUNCTUATED WITH RESOUNDING SLAPS’: LAW, EXPANSION, HIERARCHY, RESISTANCE’ This was the second iteration of the Fascism and The International symposium that I participated in – the first one took place at Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in June 2017 (full programme: https://www.academia.edu/33423310/Workshop_Fascism_and_the_International_The_Global_Order_Yesterday_and_Tomorrow_Museo_de_Arte_Moderno_Mexico_City_–_final_programme). Both were organised by Dr Rose Sydney Parfitt from Kent Law School, and both gathered an eclectic community of critical legal scholars, historians, artists, art historians, anthropologists, curators and critical theorists from all over the world. The symposium took as its starting point the rise of fascist tendencies worldwide in the last few years and its aim was to not just interpret fascism but also envisage tools to effect political change. The mixing of disciplines, and specifically law and art, was not a coincidence. As Rose noted in her opening speech: “there seems to be something about fascist and anti-fascist art, old and new, that gets to the heart of the enigma of fascism”. She explained that this is linked to the importance attached by fascism to the mythical, the intuitive, to identification, and to the power of the emotional, which allows it to take root and travel, as well as to materiality. “If any movement understood the power of the material – the power of art, architecture, rallies, uniforms, public holidays, monuments, train timetables, yellow stars – it was fascism”. These are things that legal scholarship finds difficult to tackle methodologically, unlike artists and art historians. The symposium took place in an art gallery, which attracted a mixed crowd – artists as well as academics. West Space is a not-for-profit critically engaged arts organisation founded in 1993 as an artist-run initiative by Brett Jones and Sarah Stubbs.  On show during the symposium was a group exhibition on expanded painting, and most works were quite abstract, which created a rather absurd juxtaposition with the discussed subjects. Amongst these were motherhood and the figure of the child in fascist discourse, the links between fascism and colonialism and cyberfascism. What I thought was one of the most valuable aspects of the symposium was the presence of non-European perspectives and experiences. There were papers discussing Indonesian anti-communism, the decolonisation process in the Portuguese colonies, the impact of Italian Fascism in Brazil and fascism in revolutionary Iran, amongst others, which exposed a certain universality of the fascist ideology, rarely present in the European context where most discussions oscillate around Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. The second day was especially pertinent to the current discourse on social media as the main tool for the spread of fascist ideology. Presentations about cybernazis, alt-right meme culture, fashwave (an openly fascist offshoot of the electronic dance music genre vaporwave), fascist Facebook and techno-totalitarianism were particularly enlightening. Speakers at the event included: the Mexican curator Helena Chávez Mac Gregor (UNAM, Mexico), legal scholar Dr. Ruth Cain (Kent Law School, UK) and art history Professors Patricia Leighten  and Mark Antliff (Duke University, USA). We had long, fruitful conversations during the workshop and I look forward to our future meetings and collaborations.